As you begin planning your migration from legacy versions of Windows Server, you may find that you still have some physical servers in your environment. Migrating a copy of these physical servers to virtual machines provides the ability to consolidate these servers on a smaller number of physical hosts to save on hardware costs and potentially improve resiliency. A physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration can also help to expedite the process of migrating these servers to Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft Azure by allowing you to safely test your migration steps in advance on staged copies of the original servers.

Migrating Physical Servers to Virtual Machines

In today's article in our Modernizing Your Infrastructure with Hybrid Cloud series, Blain Barton walks us through the steps for migrating existing physical servers that may still be in our environment to virtual machines. Blain explores the options for performing P2V migrations using the latest version of Disk2VHD, System Center 2012 and the forthcoming release of the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) 3.0 tool.